The Bridge Trilogy Part 43

"Wait a minute," Laney said. "You knew."

"It's the top segment on Wednesday's show." She closed the computer without bothering to turn off Clint Hiliman's detweaked chin. "But now I've had a chance to watch you work, Laney. You're a nat ural. I could almost believe there might actually be something to 0

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5. Nodal Points that nodal point bulls.h.i.+t. ome o~ your moves made no logical sense whatever, but I've just wached 3ou hone in, cold, on something it took three experienced researchers a month to excavate. You did it in just under half an hour."

"Some of that was illegal," Laney said. "You're tied into parts of DatAmerican that you aren't supposed to be."

"Do you know what anondisclosure agreement is, Laney?"

Yamazaki looked up fromhis notebook. "Very good," he said, probably to Blackwell. "This i~ very good."

Blackwell s.h.i.+fted his veight, the chair's polycarbon frame creaking faintly in protest. "But he didn't last there, did he?"

"A little over six morrhs," Laney said.

Six months could be a vety long time, at Slitscan.

He used most of his fi:st month's salary to lease a micro-batchelor in a retrofitted parking

structure on Broadway Avenue, Santa Monica. He bought s.h.i.+rts he thought were more like the ones people wore at Slitscan, and kerr his l~alaysian b.u.t.ton-downs to sleep in. He bought an expensive pair of sungla.s.ses and made sure he never displayed as much as a sirgle felt-pen in his s.h.i.+rt pocket.

Life at Slitscan had a certair. focused quality. Laney's colleagues limited themselves to a ~articular bandwidth of emotion. A certain kind of humor, as Kathy had said, was highly valued, but there was remarkably little laughter. 'Ihe expected response was eye contact, a nod, the edge of a smile. Lives were destroyed here, and sometimes re-created, careers crushed or made anew in guises surreal and unexpected. Because Slitscan's business ~as the t.i.tual letting of blood, and the blood it let was an aichemical fluid: celebrity in its rawest, purest form.

Laney's ability to locate key data in apparently random wastes of incidental information earned him the envy and grudging admiration of more experiencec researchers. He became Kathy's favorite, and was almost pleased when he discovered that a rumor had spread that they were having an affair.

They weren't-except for that one time at her place in Sherman Oaks, and that hadn't been a good idea. Nothing either of them wanted to repeat.

But Laney was still narrowing down, getting focused, pus.h.i.+ng the envelope of whatever it was that manifested as this talent, his touch. And Kathy liked that. With his eyephones on and Slitscan's dedicated landline feeding him the bleak reaches of DatAmerica, he felt increasingly at home. He went where Kathy suggested he go. He found the nodal points.

Sometimes, falling asleep in Santa Monica, he wondered vaguely if there might be a larger system, a field of greater perspective. Perhaps the whole of DatAmerica possessed its own nodal points, info-faults that might be followed down to some other kind of truth, another mode of knowing, deep within gray shoals of information. But only if there were someone there to pose the right question. He had no idea at all what that question might be, if indeed there were one, but he somthow doubted it would ever be posed from an SBU at Slitscan.

Slitscan was descended from "reality" programming and the network tabloids of the late twentieth century, but it resembled them no more than some large, swift, bipedal carnivore resembled its sluggish, shallow-dwelling ancestors. Slitscan was the mature form, supporting fully global franchises. Slitscan's revenues had paid for entire satellites and built the building he worked in in Burbank.

Slitscan was a show so popular that it had evolved into something akin to the old idea of a network. It was flanked and buffered by spinoffs and peripherals, each designed to shunt the viewer back to the crucial core, the familiar and reliably b.l.o.o.d.y altar that one of Laney's Mexican co-workers called Smoking Mirror.

It was impossible to work at Slitscan without a sense of part ic.i.p.ating in history, or else in what Kathy Torrance would argue had re P aced history. Shtscan itself, Laney suspected, might be one of those 0

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larger nodal points he sometimes found himself trying to imagine, an informational peculiarity opening into some unthinkably deeper structure.

In his quest for lesser nodal pouts, the sort that Kathy sent him into DatAmerica to locate, Laney hid already affected the courses of munic.i.p.al elections, the market in pitent gene futures, abortion laws in the State of New Jersey, and the spin on an ecstatic pro-euthanasia movement (or suicide cult, depending) called Cease Upon The Midnight, not to mention the lives and careers of several dozen celebrities of various kinds.

Not always for the worst, either,in terms of what the show's subjects might have wished for themselves. Kathy's segment on the Dukes of Nuke 'Em, exposing the band's exclusive predilection for Iraqi fetal tissue, had sent their subsequent release instant platinum (and had resulted in show-trials and public hangings in Baghdad, but he supposed life was hard there so begin with).

Laney had never been a Slitscan ~iewer, himself, and he suspected that this had counted in his favor when he'd applied as a researcher. He had no strong opinion of the show either way. He

accepted it, to the extent that he'd thought of it atall, as a fact of life. Slitscan was how a certain kind of news was done. Slitscan was where he worked.

Slitscan allowed him to do the one thing he possessed a genuine talent for, so he'd managed to avoid thinking in terms of cause and effect. Even now, attempting to e~plain himself to the attentive Mr.Yamazaki, he found it difficult to feel any clear linkage of responsibility. The rich and the famous, Kathy had once said, were seldom that way by accident. It was possible to be one or the other, but very seldom, accidentally, to be both,

Celebrities who were neither v~ere something else again, and Kathy viewed these as crosses she must bear: a ma.s.s-murderer, for instance, or his most recent victim's parents. No star quality (though she always held out hope for the murderers, feeling that at least the potential was there).

It was the other kind that Kathy wanted, directing the atten au ~AIiiIi~.m flili~g~,.

tions of Laney and as many as thirty other researchers to the more private aspects of the lives of those who were deliberately and at least moderately famous.

Alison s.h.i.+res wasn't famous at all, but the man Laney had confirmed she was having an affair with was famous enough.

And then something began to come clear to Laney.

Alison s.h.i.+res knew, somehow, that he was there, watching. As though she felt him gazing down, into the pool of data that reflected her life, its surface made of all the bits that were the daily record of her life as it registered on the digital fabric of the world.

Laney watched a nodal point begin to form over the reflection of Alison s.h.i.+res.

She was going to kill herself.

6. DESH.

(.~hia had programmed her Music Master to have an affinity for bridges. He appeared in her virtual Venice whenever she crossed one at moderate speed: a slender young man with pale blue eyes and a penchant for long, flowing coats.

He'd been the subject oi a look-and-feel action, in his beta release, when lawyers representing a venerable British singer had protested that the Music Master's designers had scanned in images of their client as a much younger man. This had been settled out of court, and all later versions, including Chia's, were much more carefully generic. (Kelsey had told her that it had mainly had to do with changing one of his eyes, but why only the one?)

She'd fed him into Venice on her second visit, to keep her company and provide musical variety, and keying his appearances to moments when she crossed bridges had seemed like a good idea. There were lots of bridges in Venice, some of them no more than a little arc of stone steps spanning the narrowest of waterways. There was the Bridge of Sighs, which Chia avoided because she found it sad and creepy, and the Bridge of Fists, which she liked mainly for its name, and so many others. And there was the Rialto, big and humped and fantastically old, where her father said men had invented banking, or a particular kind of banking. (Her father worked for a bank, which was why he had to live in Singapore.)

She'd slowed her rush through the city now, and was cruising at

a walking pace up the stepped incline of the Rialto, the Music Mas-

ter striding elegantly beside her, his putty-colored trenchcoat Happing in the breeze.

"DESFI," he said, triggered by her glance, "the I)iatonic Elaboration of Static I larmony. Also known as the Major Chord with I)escending Ba.s.sline. Bach's 'Air on a G String,' 1730. Procol Harum's 'A Whiter Shade of Pale,' 1967." If she made eye contact now, she'd hear his samples, directionless and at just the right volume. Then more about DESH, and more samples. She had him

here for company, though, and not for a lecture. But lectures were all there was to him, aside from his iconics, which were about being blond and fine-boned and wearing clothes more beautifully than any human ever could. He knew everything there was to know about music, and nothing else at all.

She didn't know how long she'd been in Venice, this visit. It was still that minute-before-dawn that she liked best, because she kept it that way.

"Do you know anything about j.a.panese music?" she asked.

"What sort, exactly7"

"What people listen to."

"Popular music?"

"I guess so."

He paused, turning, hands in his trouser pockets and the trench-coat swinging to reveal its

lining.